A Memetic Approach for Improving Minimum Cost of Economic Load Dispatch Problems

Economic load dispatch problem is a popular optimization problem in electrical power system field, which has been so far tackled by various mathematical and metaheuristic approaches including Lagrangian relaxation, branch and bound method, genetic algorithm, tabu search, particle swarm optimization, harmony search, and Taguchi method. On top of these techniques, this study proposes a novel memetic algorithm scheme combining metaheuristic algorithm and gradient-based technique to find better solutions for an economic load dispatch problem with valve-point loading. Because metaheuristic algorithms have the strength in global search and gradient-based techniques have the strength in local search, the combination approach obtains better results than those of any single approach. A bench-mark example of 40 generating-unit economic load dispatch problem demonstrates that the memetic approach can further improve the existing best solutions from the literature.